Two years ago, jack royer was faced with one of his first real challenges as a fledgling broadcaster. His father, Mike, a 34-year veteran of Birmingham TV, was visiting the booth as Jack called a Mountain Brook High School football game.

“It was the most surreal moment of my young career,” 16-year-old Jack says now. “My boss said, ‘We want you to interview him.’ It was weird. I didn’t know whether to call him Mike or Dad or Mr. Royer. I can’t remember which one I ended up calling him.”

Mike Royer laughs at the memory.

“You called me Dad,” he says. “If you had tried to call me Mr. Royer, I would have said, ‘Oh, please.’”

That awkward moment seems decades away as the two talk about Jack following in Mike’s footsteps. Jack exudes confidence on the air and off. He recently won a statewide ABBY Award from the Alabama Broadcasters Association, joining his father as an award-winning broadcaster.

“I had no inkling that either of my boys, Jack or William, would be interested in broadcasting, but we didn’t have to wait long to find out about Jack,” Mike says of he and wife Amy’s oldest son. “I think around 4 and 5, when he could begin to either mimic a newscaster or actually read as he got a little older, he would put on his coat and tie and sit at the dining room table and read the news in a real exaggerated voice to sound authoritative and grown-up. We knew instantly that he was interested. And it only took a couple of years to know that he wasn’t just interested because it’s what I do. He’s interested because he has a real passion for journalism and, specifically, television.”

It’s not easy to find father-and-son duos in television, mostly because, Mike Royer feels, you can’t just teach everything someone needs to know to be good at and feel comfortable on TV.

“I’ve always had a theory that there are two types of people in the world – those who’d rather take a beating than get in front of a TV camera and maybe in front of an audience, and then those of us who would fight you to be in the anchor chair when there’s breaking news,” Mike says.

Son, like father, falls squarely in the second camp.

“I don’t remember a time that I didn’t want to do this,” Jack says. “I remember being real little and coming up here and hanging out. Other kids might find that the most boring thing in the world, but it was so cool to me to be around the news and broadcasting in general. It fascinated me, and it still does.”

Jack, a sophomore at Mountain Brook High School, has a few regular gigs. He works the high school’s football games, participates in a short student-run newscast each morning and contributes to Scott Mauldin’s “MBTV News” program for the Mountain Brook Chamber of Commerce. His dad is one of Birmingham’s most recognizable TV personalities, first at Fox for 10 years and now going on his 25th at NBC 13.

Still, Mike seeks advice from time to time from his son, as he did after Jack helped him shoot a story about a wheelchair athlete at the Lakeshore Foundation.

“After we shot the story, I said, ‘I guess I’ll start with the car accident and how she got in her wheelchair,’” Mike recalls. “Jack said, ‘I wouldn’t mention the wheelchair at all.’ That never would have dawned on me. The day after it ran, I had an email from that young lady saying thank you for not making it about the wheelchair … There aren’t many 16-year-olds whose opinion I care much about, but if Jack says something about a story, I’ll listen because he’s been around it for so long.”

The advice, of course, flows both ways.

“There are so many times that I’ll be doing a football game, and I’ll look down and get a text from him with stuff to say at halftime,” Jack says. “I’ll look down and there’s a text from Mike Royer, and I can just read it verbatim. My dad cares about me enough to type out a text message, which sometimes for him can take a while.”

Mike, who just turned 60, is just as proud of his 14-year-old son, Will, an eighth-grader who’s in “that other group who’d rather take a beating than be in front of a TV camera.” “They’re completely different, but I’m just so proud of both of them,” Mike says. “Will is so interesting and smart … I kind of know what Jack is going to do. I really want to live long enough to see what Will wants to do. He’ll be equally as happy finding his own niche, but like me at his age, he doesn’t know what he wants to do, yet.”

Jack does.

“I love being in front of people and love being the first to know things and the first to share things,” he says. “If something happens at my school where I get to go on our closed-circuit television, I want to be the one to do it. At the end of my career, I want people to turn on the TV and say, ‘Jack Royer will know what’s going on’.”

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